The Forgotten Room: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY LINCOLN CHILD

  THE THIRD GATE

  TERMINAL FREEZE

  DEEP STORM

  DEATH MATCH

  UTOPIA

  WITH DOUGLAS PRESTON

  The Pendergast Novels

  BLUE LABYRINTH

  WHITE FIRE

  TWO GRAVES

  COLD VENGEANCE

  FEVER DREAM

  CEMETERY DANCE

  THE WHEEL OF DARKNESS

  THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

  DANCE OF DEATH

  BRIMSTONE

  STILL LIFE WITH CROWS

  THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

  RELIQUARY

  RELIC

  Gideon Crew Novels

  THE LOST ISLAND

  GIDEON’S CORPSE

  GIDEON’S SWORD

  THE ICE LIMIT

  THUNDERHEAD

  RIPTIDE

  MOUNT DRAGON

  This book is a work of fiction. Names; characters; places; corporations; federal, state, or private institutions; and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Lincoln Child

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover photographs: (sky) E+ Getty Images; (mansion) Steve Dunwell PhotoLibrary Getty Images; (sea) Shaun Lowe Vetta / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Child, Lincoln.

  The forgotten room : a novel / Lincoln Child. — First Edition.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53140-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-38553141-2 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3553.H4839F67 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2014044677

  eBook ISBN 9780385531412

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lincoln Child

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  For Veronica

  1

  It was perhaps the most unusual sight ever beheld on the august and stately grounds of the Glasgow Institute of Science, founded in 1761 by grant of charter from George III. A large podium, studded with microphones, had been erected on the Great Lawn, directly in front of the administration building. Before it had been set some three dozen folding chairs, on which sat reporters from local newspapers, the Times of London, Nature, Oceanography, Time magazine, and a host of others. To the right of the podium were two television cameras, one from the BBC and the other from CNN. To the podium’s left was a large wooden scaffold, upon which sat a large, strange-looking machine of dark metal: a cross between a cigar tube and a pincushion, about thirty feet long, with a bulky attachment protruding from its upper edge.

  The restless chatter among the reporters grew muted as the main doors to the administration building opened and two men stepped out into the September afternoon sunlight. One was plump and short, with a shock of white hair and wearing a thick tweed coat. The other was tall and quite thin, with rather severe features, light brown hair, and alert gray eyes. Unlike the first man, he was dressed in a conservative dark suit.

  The two approached the podium and the older man cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” he began, “thank you for coming. I am Colin Reed, provost of the Glasgow Institute of Science, and to my right is Jeremy Logan.”

  Reed took a sip from a glass of water on one side of the podium, cleared his throat again. “You may well know of Dr. Logan’s work. He is perhaps the only, and certainly the preeminent, enigmalogist operating in the world today. His job is to investigate, interpret, and explain the—for lack of a better word—unexplainable. He throws light upon riddles of history; he separates myth from truth and the natural from the supernatural.”

  At Reed’s side, Jeremy Logan frowned slightly, as if uncomfortable at this bit of panegyric.

  “About two months ago, we contacted Dr. Logan on his home ground of Yale University and asked him to undertake an assignment for us. That assignment can be briefly explained: to definitively prove, or disprove, the existence of the creature popularly referred to as the Loch Ness monster. Dr. Logan has spent the last six weeks in Inverness, doing precisely that. I will now ask him to share his findings with you.”

  Reed stepped back from the microphones and Logan approached. He surveyed the crowd of reporters for a moment, then began to speak. His voice was relatively low and mild, the mid-Atlantic accent contrasting with Reed’s Scottish burr.

  “The Loch Ness monster,” he began, “is the most famous of all the supposed Scottish lake monsters, perhaps the most famous of all cryptids. The institute’s aim in hiring me for this particular task was not to stunt the local tourism industry or to put peddlers of Loch Ness iconography out of business. Rather, it was to put a stop to the amateur and misguided attempts at searching for the creature—attempts that have been on the increase recently and, at least twice in the last year, have resulted in deaths by drowning.”

  He took a sip from his own water glass. “I quickly realized that proving the existence of the creature required only one thing—observing it in its element. Proving that the creature does not exist, however, would require a great deal more work. Technology would be my greatest ally. Hence I persuaded the United States Navy, of which I was once a part, to lend me this one-man research submersible.” And Logan waved at the strange-looking machine sitting on the wooden scaffold to his right. “The submersible is equipped with continuous-wave radar, synthetic aperture sonar, pulse-compression echolocating devices, and numerous other technologies for both underwater mapping and target acquisition.

  “There were two important factors to take into account. First, the Loch is quite long and unusually deep—seven hundred and fifty feet in places. Second, so-called sightings of the creature suggested a morphology similar t
o a plesiosaur, which would put it at something between twenty and forty feet in length. There were several unknown variables to contend with, of course, such as the creature’s range of movement and environmental preferences, but these could not be determined until such time as it was located.

  “I began by familiarizing myself with the features of the submersible and the layout of the loch—both above and below the surface. My service in the navy made the former relatively straightforward. I spent one week in this shakedown period, during which time I uncovered no sign of the creature.

  “Next, I had the institute procure for me some netting—rather a lot of netting, in fact. Using spools of military-grade nylon mesh, we put together a net ten thousand feet by eight hundred feet.”

  This brought murmurs of surprise.

  “What came next was rather tedious but—after the first few run-throughs—quite straightforward. I was lucky in the fact that the loch, although some twenty miles long, is not particularly wide: just under two miles at its widest point. We started at the northernmost point of the loch and worked south. My work was aided by two research assistants from the institute and two motor launches out of Inverness. Each day, using the submersible, I would comb an area of the loch consisting of a single mile in a southerly direction. A mile-long slice of the loch, as it were, along the x, y, and z axes. For each of these discrete slices, I would make three separate passes at different depths, using the submersible’s movement and targeting technologies to search for any objects the size of the creature. This equipment has significant range and precision; had any object of the requisite size been in the slice, I would have located it. At the end of each day, with the help of the research assistants—one on each shore of the loch—and the two boats on the loch itself, I moved the netting one mile forward, to the terminal point of my search for that day. This vast mesh covered the entire loch laterally, like an antisubmarine net. The mesh was broad enough for any normal fish to swim through without difficulty, but narrow enough to prevent anything larger than forty centimeters wide from passing. Watercraft were dealt with on a one-by-one basis.

  “Each day I explored an additional one-mile slice of the loch, searching for the creature. At the end of each day, as mentioned, we pulled the net forward another mile. After twenty days we reached the southern end of the loch—without result. And so, ladies and gentlemen, you can take as fact the four words I’m about to speak—though I speak them with some regret, since I enjoy cryptozoological legends as much as the next man: There ain’t no Nessie.”

  This was greeted with applause, a scattering of laugher.

  A low sound became audible in the distance: a droning, repetitive thudding. As the sound drew closer, it became identifiable as helicopter blades cutting through the air. Then a fat chopper with military markings appeared over a nearby hilltop lined with redbrick row houses. It approached quickly now—an American navy aircraft—then descended, hovering directly over the Great Lawn and the dark gray submersible. Grass flattened out in a circular direction, and the reporters were forced to grab hats and papers to prevent them from flying. A technician in a jumpsuit trotted out a side door of the administration building, climbed up the wooden scaffolding, and attached two huge hooks that had been reeled out of the helicopter’s belly onto fastenings on the upper surface of the submersible. He crawled back down, gave a thumbs-up, and the helicopter began to rise gingerly, the craft swaying beneath it. Higher and higher it climbed, and then it turned slowly and began heading eastward, its peculiar cargo trailing behind it by the two lifelines. Within sixty seconds it was gone. The entire operation had taken less than five minutes.

  Logan watched the distant horizon for a moment, then turned back to the press. “And now,” he said, “I would be happy to answer your questions as fully as I can.”

  —

  Three hours later, in the snug of the Edwardian-era bar within Glasgow’s most opulent hotel, the same two persons—Colin Reed and Jeremy Logan—toasted each other over glasses of a peaty single-malt scotch, served neat.

  “An excellent performance,” Reed was saying. “And I don’t just mean at the press conference today—an excellent performance from beginning to end.”

  “Acting is new to me,” Logan replied. “But it’s nice to know that, if the ghost-hunting business ever dries up, I can always supplement my Yale salary by treading the boards.”

  “ ‘I would be happy to answer your questions as fully as I can,’ ” Reed said, chuckling at the memory. “Nice bit of prevarication, that.” He took a sip of his scotch. “Well, I think we can safely say that with today’s announcement—in addition to the new rules that have been instituted regarding use of watercraft in the loch—all this hunting for the monster will die off.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Reed started, as if forgetting something. “Oh, yes.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a slender envelope. “Here’s your stipend.”

  “I still feel bad taking money from the institute,” Logan said as he pocketed the envelope. “But I console myself with the thought that it’s recompense for the damage my reputation would suffer should the truth ever become known.”

  “We thank you—and, more important, I’m sure Nessie thanks you.” The provost paused. “You have the, ah, data with you?”

  Logan nodded.

  “And you still believe the best thing is to destroy it?”

  “It’s the only option. What if those images got into the open—or, God forbid, went viral on the Internet? It would undo everything we’ve accomplished. I’ll burn them as soon as I get up to my room.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Reed hesitated. “May I…may I have one last look?”

  “Of course.” Logan glanced around the bar, then unlocked the Zero Halliburton attaché case that sat on the banquette beside him, extracted a folder, and passed it to Reed. The man took it, opened it, and leafed through the pages within, his eyes glittering with hungry fascination.

  The pages contained images produced from a variety of technologies: acoustic backscatter, synthetic aperture pulse, active beam-forming sonar. The images all showed the same thing, in different positions and from different angles: a creature with a bulky, ovoid body; lateral fins; and a long, slender neck. Reed lingered over the images for a moment. Then, with a rueful sigh, he closed the folder and passed it back to Logan.

  Just as Logan was returning it to his attaché case, a man in the hotel’s uniform walked up to their table. “Dr. Logan?” he asked.

  Logan nodded.

  “There’s a call for you. It’s waiting at the front desk.”

  Logan frowned. “I’m in the middle of a meeting. Can’t it wait?”

  The man shook his head. “No, sir. I’m afraid the party on the line said that the matter was urgent. Most urgent.”

  2

  Approaching from the west along Rhode Island’s Route 138, the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge was a four-lane, concrete box girder affair of a pleasing—if rather alarmingly pitched—design. It was midday, out of season; traffic was fairly light; and Dr. Jeremy Logan prodded the accelerator of his ’68 Lotus Elan just a little. The coupe obliged, rising effortlessly up and over the span. A narrow nubbin of land shot by beneath, and then a second bridge appeared ahead: the Claiborne Pell. This bridge was both much longer and much taller. Logan knew just enough about structural engineering to find suspension bridges faintly disquieting, and he pushed a little harder on the gas pedal. The car climbed; he topped the apex of the span—and then the view ahead and below drove all thoughts of resonant frequencies from his mind.

  Newport, Rhode Island, lay before him, jewel-like and sparkling in the early autumn sun, like Oz at the end of the yellow brick road. Coves, marinas, harbors, wharves, and gleaming buildings dressed in stone or white-painted clapboard—barely discernible at this distance—stretched out to the left and right. In the middle distance, a handful of sloops and catboats coursed through the water, heeled over by the wind, their
white sails taut and full. It was a sight that never grew old, and Logan drank it in.

  It was almost enough to make him forget the nagging mystery of why, exactly, he was here.

  At the end of the bridge he turned right onto Farewell Street, then cut through the narrow, traffic-heavy lanes of the old downtown until he reached Memorial Boulevard. Like all tourists, he turned first left, then right onto Bellevue. But then, instead of veering off to the east—toward the Cliff Walk and the impeccably manicured facades of such “cottages” as Marble House or the Breakers—Logan made his way south and west until he reached Ocean Avenue. He passed a series of small beaches, a country club, the inevitable summer mansions. And then, some two miles on, he slowed before a narrow road of paved stone that led south from the main thoroughfare, with no other name than PRIVATE fixed to its road sign. He turned onto the lane. A hundred yards on he reached a tall wall of weathered brick, leading off to each side as far as the eye could see. Directly ahead was a gate in the wall, and a quaint slate-roofed structure that served as a security station. Logan stopped to show some papers; the guard within the station glanced at them, nodded, and passed them back; the gate across the road lifted and, with a wave, Logan drove on.

  The narrow, winding road passed through a tiny wood, over one low rise of land, and then another. And then, rounding a corner, Logan stopped as he caught his first glimpse of Lux in almost ten years.